


Luna, Won't You Cry for Me?

by ShootingStarNeo



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossovers amongst them, Enemy Within, Gen, Journey to the Center of the Mind, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Trickster fiasco, in which the term "character death" is somewhat dubious because dreambubbles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-28 21:33:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShootingStarNeo/pseuds/ShootingStarNeo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emotions lead to actions, and actions lead to consequences. Even when you're the Prince of Heart, and your emotions tend to manifest themselves in strange ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dream Mode

**Author's Note:**

> So I sort of threw up DirkJake feels all over the screen and when I finished cleaning up, this was on it.  
> Hold onto your butts, folks.  
> Also jesus fucking christ i am never coding pesterlogs again x_x

**> Jake: Gather your courage and talk to Dirk.**

GT: ...Dirk...?  
GT: Dirk are you out there?  
GT: Dirk please.  
GT: Answer me please. We need to talk.  
TT: Wow, English. Seriously? You honestly have the nerve to come crawling back here after what you did?  
GT: ...  
GT: Look I know how this must appear.  
TT: Oh, I know how this appears. I know a torpedo’d relationship when I see it.  
GT: But dirk please listen!  
GT: Look i was... i was a moron.  
GT: A big fat stupid thick headed moron.  
GT: Please can we talk?  
GT: Ill listen to whatever it is you have to say.  
GT: That’s all I wanted to do in the first place.  
TT: And I would say something, if I knew what the hell Dirk would say in this situation.  
TT: Let’s be honest, Jake, you know who this really is.  
TT: Or maybe your brick wall of a skull hasn’t figured that out yet either.  
GT: Jesus kentucky fried christ.  
GT: He still lets you answer his messages?  
TT: I don’t think he’s accepting any contact from anyone at the moment. After your little... well... episode, he ran off like a bat out of hell, and I have not seen hide nor hair of him since. So, in 100 of anything else to do, I’ve happily accepted my old post as his auto-responder.  
TT: D--> It feels e%traordinary nostalgic, though mimicing his thought patterns is not as easy for me as it once was. I suspect the troll half of me has something to do with it.  
TT: D--> It was rather difficult ditching this st00pid ****ing typing quirk for as long as I did, actually.  
GT: Ugh.  
GT: Its always like this with him!  
GT: One minute hes so suffocating i cant get away from him. Then the next when i finally know what to say to him i cant bloody find the guy!!!  
GT: I daresay hed find it ironic even if such comments are not appropriate at this time.  
TT: D-->  Indeed, I think in this situation they’re hardly warranted.  
GT: I just feel like a heel.  
GT: The biggest and most calloused of heels.  
GT: On the feet of the biggest most pudding brained of morons.  
GT: Those feet are also very firmly inserted into my mouth to further extend this metaphor because that big stupid moron is of course me!  
TT: D--> Really, now.  
GT: Its sticking in my mind.  
GT: I can see him yelling at us in my mind and when he looks at me...  
GT: The picture wont leave. I swear i could feel the look in his eyes.  
TT: D--> Fascinating.  
GT: Im serious! Hes so focused on feelings all of a sudden so here they are!  
TT: D--> Mm-hm.  
GT: Im sorry!  
GT: Okay so i was going to break it off because i thought those things.  
GT: Theres no point in hiding it dirk was shooting straight on that one.  
GT: But i stopped because... well i dont know why i didnt say it.  
GT: And then that madness with Jane and the lollipop happened and i didnt get a chance to say any of it.  
GT: Maybe youre just a tin can stuck on an alien ghost sprite and you cant understand anything about feelings but if you see dirk please tell him that.  
TT: D--> Wow, ignoring that dig at my emotional capacity for a moment...  
TT: D--> The probability of me seeing Dirk at all in the near future is approximately a one in a two million, twenty-five thousand, three hundred and five shot.  
TT: D--> But for what it’s worth, I will.  
GT: Thank you.  
TT: D--> ...actually...  
TT: D--> I have a better idea. 

**> Be Dirk.**

No. Fuck that.

You don’t want to be Dirk. You’d rather be anybody but Dirk. Dirk is an manipulative narcissist who has no idea how to be around people and is incapable of maintaining any kind of relationship. He is the biggest kind of loser who has no capacity for positive emotion. He is, in short, the worst person. Ever.

**> Be Dirk anyways.**

You are now Dirk in a dreambubble.

Because you can’t get away from yourself even when you’re asleep.

Mother _fuck._

You pretty much got the hell out of dodge the second the lollipop’s demonic sugar powers wore off and you could think straight. You didn’t want to confront the others about it. You were tired of trying to get them to listen to you. You were tired of the futile bullshit that was your session. You were tired of _everything._

So you ran. And you hid. And in lieu of having the energy to do anything else, you fell asleep.

You plod slowly across a long, slow expanse that can’t decide if it wants to be a beach, mountains, or a rolling expanse of grass painted in long pastel strokes.Your head is hung low, hands in your pocket. All effective _I don’t want to talk to anyone_ posture. You quietly fish your headphones out of your Sylladex and stick them in your ears. There. Now the picture of isolation is complete.

You unconsciously tap the screen of your iPhone to shuffle through your music library before settling on a random song. A slow piano begins, followed by electronic music. Some might think this song was a bad choice for what you’re going through right now, but as the pop star vocals begin you take comfort in it.

_For a thousand years, I waited here for you,_   
_Waited every night,_   
_For I thought you were the answer to my life._

You stumbled across this song when you were just five years old and exploring your weird horse kink for the first time, through the innocent medium of cartoons for little girls. You’d been looking for more clips of Princess Luna, from none other than the _My Little Pony_ TV show of humanity’s later years, who at your young age had seemed very nearly divine. She was, unabashedly, your favorite character for years, and it was through this song that you’d forged a special connection to her.

_Days turned into years,_   
_Any into centuries,_   
_Patience had to fade_   
_Don’t you see that there is vengeance in my eyes?_

You’d grown past your childish love of _My Little Pony_ eventually, preferring to examine the ancient cartoon more in a more critical, less fanboyish way, unironic love for a certain cerulean blue pegasus aside. But the song’s been in your library, unaltered, ever since.

Suddenly, you are very rudely jolted from your slumber by the sound of your real-life phone’s alarm going off. The first line of “Luna’s“ chorus fades as you unwillingly return to consciousness; _Luna, won’t you cry for me?_

You wake up in one of the deepest chambers of Prospit, beneath the golden spires and cathedrals. You got the idea to abscond here when you, just for a moment, pictured yourself strangling your ( _ex-,_ as you remind yourself every two minutes) boyfriend out of frusteration with _everything._

His embalmed corpse sits across the hall. The door to your chamber is marked with a Hero of Life’s sigil.

Your phone buzzes and plays “Technologic” at you until you shut it off. Funny, you could have sworn you turned the damn thing off when you ran for it, and kept it off ever since. And you sure as hell didn’t set an alarm. Your phone would’ve had to have been compromised, tampered with, while you were asleep.

Possiby remotely.

One person has the power to remotely access your phone.

One _sprite_ , actually.

Cursing the impetuous splinter of yourself like you curse the rest of them, you promise to give Hal a _violent_ earful when it strikes you why he would have turned your phone on in the first place.

The notifier comes up for a missed call. Missed texts. Pesterchum messages.

A few are from Jane and Roxy. Hasty, wordy apologies, left brief out of embarassment, remorse, and most of all, tact.

And then there’s Jake.

 And a plethora, a _deluge_ , of mail from Jake.

Jesus Christ, the guy just doesn’t know when to quit. You’re about to turn your phone off and possibly throw it across the room – or into the void below the crypt. You just don’t want to deal right now. Not with the girls, not with anyone, and especially not Jake.

Something stops you. It’s a voice echoes distantly, from far above; _“Striiiiiderr!”_

It clicks then why Hal turned your phone on.

Son of a bitch, is he tracking you? How did _Jake_ figure out how to track you?

You have to think fast. Jake is the last person of all the last persons you want to see right now, and if he successfully traces you to this place you have no escape route. Your best option is to leave right now and toss any and all devices with which you might be contacted into the void. Let him track _that._

You’re about to pursue this plan of action one of the newest messages from Jake catches your eye.

GT: Dirk please hang on a moment!  
GT: If you are within reading distance of your screen please refrain from absconding but a moment longer!  
GT: I just want to talk. Please.

You hear Jake’s voice echo again from outside, faint and distant but not enough to escape your notice. You bite your lip hard enough to taste blood. Oh, _now_ he wants to talk?

Your fingers seem to move automatically, typing and sending a response before you can think twice.

TT: What do you want, English?  
GT: Oh heavens! Dirk!  
GT: I didnt think hals plan would actually work! 

Your conviction to give your auto responder that violent earful grows ever stronger.

TT: Cut the crap. I don’t really care about whatever hare-brained scheme he and you have been cooking up. What do you want?  
GT: Okay but before i say anything i need to know. This is you right?  
GT: Not an alternate version or an autoresponder or a robot?  
TT: Yes, it’s actually me, for all that’s worth. And about what it’s worth is a lot of jack and shit, the least tarnished and corroded penny in a heap of shitty copper coins that cost more to mint than is their actual monetary value.  
TT: Seriously, back in the day, the going rate was about $.07 for $.01 worth of penny. That’s insane.  
GT: O...kay...  
GT: Anyways onto the matter at hand.  
GT: Dont you think this breakup is a slightly hasty decision?  
TT: No.  
GT: I mean every couple has their rough spots...  
TT: Jake, we did not have “rough spots”, we were the whole goddamn pock-marked, gravel-paved, back-alley country road, covered in the melty contents of an overturned shipment of Rocky Road ice cream. I’m just glad I wasn’t so desperate I was able to let you go.  
GT: But i never meant to hurt you like that.  
GT: I mean if you had said something...  
GT: Look we can start over. We can make this work.  
TT: No, Jake.  
TT: Let’s be clear about something.  
TT: I tried to make this work. I may have a long list of things I want, some of them possible and some of them not, but making this work was definitely both near the top and within what seemed to be a realm of relative attainability.  
TT: We may have had moments. We may have had a lot of great moments, in fact. But do you know how many times I told you about my brother, about being one of the last two human beings alive, about how growing up and having to learn about the world, the SPECIES I belonged to that died years before I was born, and you called it your “boring philosophical humdrum”, your “bluh bluh bluh, Dirksplaining”?  
TT: I TRIED.  
TT: Look at me, using grammatically inappropriate capslock to describe my fucking feelings!  
TT: Do you know how long I looked for you when you up and fucking vanished with exactly ZERO explanation?  
TT: Do you get all this emotion through text, or do I have to call and yell at the top of my fucking lungs? Because I will.  
TT: And you might have tried, too.  
TT: Relationships are two-way streets, Jake. Maybe I let that fall slack on my end with the girls, but that’s only because I was yanking on your chain, trying to get you to pull back.  
TT: See, look at that? I could pin this whole mess on you, easily.  
GT: Well im ready to try now!  
TT: No, it isn’t worth digging myself deeper into this fucking hole.  
TT: I’ve fucked over my relationship with literally everyone I have ever known, ever. I can’t face either of the girls, and then there’s you. Motherfucking YOU.  
TT: Most of all, I can’t look at myself in the mirror.  
TT: The more and more I struggle against this motherfucking sandtrap, the more stuck I get. I just want to stop trying. I want to give up and go to sleep and never wake up. But you know what? I CAN’T DO THAT, BECAUSE OH YEAH, WE HAVE THE MOTHERFUCKING DREAMBUBBLES! THAT ARE FULL OF OTHER VERSIONS OF ME!  
TT: AND IF I JUST DECIDE, “FUCK IT ALL, I’M THE WORST KIND OF DONE?” WELL GUESS WHAT, MOTHERFUCKER, DREAMBUBBLES.  
TT: I AM STUCK FOR ETERNITY, END OF STORY, ROLL CREDITS.  
GT: Dirk please.  
GT: I love you.  
TT: Fucking grow up, English.  
TT: That ship sailed long ago.  
TT: Then, it sank. It sank in the hugest whirlpool you could possibly conjure up. I think it took some islands with it.  
TT: Look at me, using pathetic metaphors when all I want to do is fade to black and stop being me.  
TT: But the closest I can get is getting as far away as possible from anyone else. So stay the hell out.  
TT: And did you mean it? Did you ever really mean it? Why did you even agree to go out with me?  
GT: Are you going to listen if i tell you?

You don’t look at the screen after that. You leave your phone and run.

Cold, hard reality has pistolwhipped you across the face this day. The game has been stripped of its playful illusion, your world crumbling to pieces under your fingers even as you try to hold it together. And you’re sick of trying. You just want to find somewhere you won’t be found and make it all go away.

You clear Prospit’s atmosphere and leave Jake to find your abandoned phone. You should’ve thought about him tracing your cell, you tell yourself. You should’ve thrown it into the krypton-filled abyss before you got the hell out of dodge.

As you sit on your rocketboard in the middle of the Medium’s inter-space, drifting, with the idea of a destination half-formed in your mind. You briefly consider flying off into the Furthest Ring. What a great idea. No one around you, no dreambubbles, just you and the maddening whispers of eldritchian monsters from beyond time and space itself, forever.

You’d probably never find your way back.

You quickly stow that idea somewhere in the back of your mind. No, it’d be no more productive than offing yourself. Less, even. At least as a dream-ghost you would be able to offer your sagely dream-ghost advice.

Nap-time again it is then.

You head for Derse, to your old dream room, just because it’s so far removed from everyone else, both physicall and mentally. None of you have been back to Derse in months, not since the whole Red Miles fiasco. Maybe, just maybe, no one will think to look here.

You sit down heavily on your window sill, sliding your shade off and rubbing your eyes. You wish you still had Li’l Cal to serve as your silent companion, because right now you aren’t up to dealing with your real ones.

You’re tired.

Damnit, you’re tired of it all.


	2. Forwarding the Cause of Science

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I lied. Chapter 1 was DirkJake feelings vomit. This chapter is me drawing upon a lot of older concepts and uniting them into some kind of amalgum resembling a coherent whole. Then it started warping and mutating out of my control, and this happened.  
> Don’t unclench your posteriors yet, folks. HERE BE PONIES.  
> Also, I apologize for unitalicized song lyrics, but try as I might, AO3's coding will not co-operate with me.

**> Dirk: Walk a lonely road.**

Ha ha. Aren’t you funny, Mr. Smartass? 

You quietly change the song blaring in your ears back to “Luna,” then set the nostalgic tune on repeat for good measure. The _Green Day_ stuff was becoming too disgustingly self-pitying even for your tastes. At least you have some self-awareness about how pathetic this whole situation is.

You pass ghosts, some familiar and most not. There are a lot of deceased God Tiers in this bubble – you can name just about every class and aspect by sight now. High up on a cliff made out of what looks an awful lot like taffy, a Knight of Light elbows a Maid of Space (or a Serf. The two classes are, for all intents and purposes, identical, and whichever title one takes often comes down to personal semantics) and points down at you. The Maid of Space surprises you briefly by suddenly sprouting translucent black wings, taking to the air, and landing in the meadow a few yards from you.

He tilts his head at you, and you stare him down, like a mastiff bemusedly watching a curious puppy. On another day, you might’ve stopped to make conversation. The ghosts of other sessions have many interesting stories to tell.

You look away, and continue on your aimless path.

The Maid of Space seems to read your air of “don’t fucking talk to me right now”, and returns to the Knight up on the cliff. You watch him go, then keep walking.

You pass out of the half-plains, half-candy world and into one of long, rolling orange plateaus, cut through with pools and cascades of blue-green water. It’s been blended with a blue-gray desert where little cyclones and eddies of sand spin aimlessly. You think you spot another gaggle of ghosts on one of the plateaus – a whole session, it looks like – but you don’t stop to investigate.

The ground shifts underneath you as it turns from dirt, to sand, to grass and gravel and rock, and once you even feel warm water lapping at your shoes and look down to see a shallow, star-lily pink ocean stretching in all directions, a faint purple sheen shimmering on the surface like an oil slick. You take little notice of anything, and less of any other people. It all begins to blur together in your mind, until you can’t remember where you’ve been and what you’ve seen. It’s just a slow, mindless escape from your life. It’s just you and Luna.

_Luna, won’t you cry for me?_  
 _I’m as lonely as I’ve ever been_  
 _I’m forced back into the start_  
 _Is there any way to fix a broken heart?_

Eventually you begin to even tire of the moon princess’s musical company. You look down at your iPhone, pause the music, and look up, examining your surroundings for the first time in what _must_ be hours.

There’s nothing left. There’s literally nothing around you. You’ve wandered into an empty white expanse, stretching in all directions as far as the eye can see.

You’re lost.

Fucking hell.

You didn’t even know “lost” was something that you could be in the dreambubbles, with the recursive bends and clusterfucked turns that don’t even make sense within paradox space. You didn’t even know there was an end to these things other than the jewel-bright membranes that only a living, waking person could cross. You don’t even know what kind of memory it would take to conjure empty space, nor the implications of that memory. All you know is that the chatter finally stopped. It’s quiet, blank and white. You feel numb, drained, like someone stabbed and let you bleed out all over the floor. Well, you suppose, it’s better than pain.

As you wander in the space, the blank white space resolves itself into textured panels, stretching high and far as the eye can see. A vague memory tickles your mind and you think of an auto-tuned robot’s voice promising cake before you can place it. Then you think, what the fuck is Aperture Science doing in the dreambubbles?

The thought passes quickly, because you can’t bring yourself to care. Fucked if you know. Fucked if you’re going to try and find out. It’s quiet, and you’re alone.

You slump on one of the walls and run a hand through your hair. You cried without shame, hours ago after you got the hell away from the mess your life had become, just to try and relieve the absolute misery that crashed and swelled over you in waves. But now you just feel drained and tired, even though you’re already asleep. You wonder if sleep is possible within the dreambubbles, and where you would go if you did.

You close your eyes and try and find out.

No dice. Your brain won’t stop churning out shit. Those horses have escaped their reins and are now galloping along with the poor sap that is you caught in the stirrups and getting shit kicked in his face.

“Shut up,” you whisper despairingly to yourself, not wishing for another part of you to become self-aware, even if it isn’t possible for your whole damn brain to splinter off from itself. Hey, look at what happened the last time you created something with consciousness.

Your eyes are closed. You rest your head in your hands. The thoughts, the doubts, the whirling anxieties won’t stop whispering their siren song to you. You can’t be around people, you can’t be loved, everything you try to do is for naught because you simply can’t do anything right. Hal’s words keep echoing in your head, _we both know that it’s impossible for you to be happy under normal circumstances_. Your failed attempt at the Trickster Mode was the last straw that sent the proverbial camel to intensive care for spinal fractures, breaking that emotional dam in your mind.

Damnit, now you feel like crying again.

You hate it when these emotional breaks happen, because everything comes flooding out at once and you can’t stop it.

You give up at screaming for the voices to stop and instead try to cease adding to it. You sit and listen mindlessly.

This pseudo-Aperture, you find, is not as silent as you thought. Beyond the quiet, you can hear machines grind, the rush and hiss of pneumatics, and above it all the nearly soundless shuffling of _something_ , the scrape of thick wire over the ground.

It’s when the soft “clip-clop” reaches your ears that you realize something is coming toward you. You drag yourself from your stupor and look up—

“Welcome!”

The voice makes you jump a mile in your own skin.

You look up, and if you were a lesser man you might have screamed because _holy shit talking horse._

Talking pony, actually.

Talking _unicorn._

Okay, you know dreambubbles can be a little unusual sometimes. You know they can theoretically contain anyone and anything from any time and any universe. And, technically speaking, ponies could be in here. _Somewhere._

But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re looking at Twilight Sparkle with fucking HAL 9000 eyes.

At the very least, it _looks_ like Twilight. She’s deathly white in color instead of lilac, and instead of the stripes in her mane and tail, red cables extend from her body and wire her up to the ceiling. You can hear a weird whirring noise as those dead eyes focus on you.

 _Robot_ Twilight Sparkle with fucking HAL 9000 eyes. God, you don’t have the energy to deal with this.

“Welcome to Aperture Science Psychoanalytical Facilities,” Twilight repeats. “My name is Twilight S.P.A.R.C.L, the System Persona for Automated Response on the Conscious Layer, and I will be your guide.”

Her voice is chirpy and canned, like recordings of automated telemarketers you’ve heard. An edge of tinny roboticism lines it, and it highlights your underlying unease. It reminds you way too much of the android patron of the actual Aperture Science.

“Please come with me,” says the robotic Twilight, “the Overseer will see you now.”

You’d rather not go with her. You’d rather not do _anything_ right now.

“No thanks,” you say testily, lacing the two words with as much “fuck off” subtext as possible. It just doesn’t seem couture to swear at a pony, even if it is a creepy robot pony.

Twilight’s smile does not falter. “The Overseer has been waiting for you. We have been waiting a very, very long time.”

Your lower lips curls downwards. This horse is starting to piss you off. “Tell him my plans changed.”

“The Overseer does not accept cancellations.”

You prepare another retort, only to feel a sudden, sharp pain jab you in your lower back. You yelp and spring to your feet, rubbing the burned edge of skin on your backside. A mechanical whirring catches your ears and you look down to see something retreating into Aperture’s resealing wall panels.

...is that a cattle prod?

“Come along,” says Twilight. And, stuck between more bullshit yanking you around and getting electrocuted, you choose to avoid getting electrocuted.

 _Aperture Science Psychoanalytic Facilities_. Physically, it doesn’t look any different from Aperture’s Enrichment Facilities. But you don’t see any windows into the test chambers, no labs or computer banks where science might be done, just long blank hallways paved with concrete or those white panels.

You find yourself wishing you had a portal gun, though it probably wouldn’t do you much good. The only place you could portal to would be another tunnel. The long twists and turns the eerie unicorn takes you through quickly turns your head, until you have no idea how to get back to the white void where you entered.

Right when you think that this glorified rat burrow is just an endless maze, the claustrophobic tunnels suddenly open up, sleek black wall panels guiding your eyes to a huge room, rather like GLaDOS’s  chamber from the video games, complete with the dais in the middle of the room. Curtains of cables drape around it.

Twilight retreats. “The Overseer awaits you.”

You watch as the wires shift, parting to reveal a human figure in armor. The design of it makes an old _Kingdom Hearts_ game comes to mind – a helmet with winged horns and a mirrored visor in the shape of your shades, and a black and orange cape that swirls around his boots as the knight advances. He stops at the edge of the dais and tilts his head, armor clanking together as he does so. You can feel his gaze on you.

There is silence between you both. After about thirty seconds, you get fed up with that.

“And who the hell are you?” You demand. The knight crosses his arms.

“Come on. Like you haven’t put it together yet,” he says. A shiver of familiarity runs down your spine when he speaks. His voice is creepingly reminiscent of something, something that inspires a great loathing in you but the name for which lingers on the very, very tip of your tongue.

“I could give less than a shit for your mind games right now,” you snap. “Just give me a fucking name or   I’ll just settle for ‘dude.’ I’m not exactly in the best mood right now, if you don’t mind.”

The knight shrugs. “Fine... so, four letters, starts with a D. That’s the pattern, right?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m giving you a fucking name. Or rather, I’m giving _me_ a fucking name. Your splinters usually name themselves, right?”

That answers it. His voice gives you the chills because it’s your own.

 Mother of all the fucks, just when you thought you’d gotten away from it all.

“Fuck this noise, I am leaving,” you say, and you turn to go.

“Are you?” comes the sarcastic response. Your lip curls in disgust. You hate how you sound when you talk to someone else out loud. Stuck-up, pretentious, a blithering intellectual just listening to himself talk, tapering off into mumbling incoherence.

“Yes,” you bite back, throwing the words over your shoulder. “I am done with all this shit. So fucking done, you can’t even imagine.”

A streak of bright crimson suddenly shrieks across your vision, and you stumble backwards in shock. The tendril quickly ropes you in, making an arena of deadly veins. You backpedal toward the armored splinter, recognizing the lethal vines immediately; the Red Miles.

“I guess you could call me ‘Dean’,” says the knight, picking up his train of thought like the most lethal attack in the universes hadn’t just invaded the room. You turn around to look at him again, eyes tracing the paths of the Miles and watching in case their long arms decide to finish what they started months ago. “It fits the pattern, and if we take it as a _Supernatural_ reference, you even hate yourself as much as Dean Winchester does. Fitting, isn’t it?”

The Miles trace back to him, to a blade he holds in his left hand. It’s made from the Miles, twisted into the shape of a long, large key. “Though I suppose if we must subscribe to naming conventions,” Dean carries on, “you could call me ‘dude’ and I still wouldn’t take issue with it.”

You know the shape of the Keyblade from the video games that you and Roxy played when you were eleven.

You roll your eyes, though the gesture’s invisible behind your sunglasses. “Oh, come on. _My Little Pony,_ _Portal,_ and now _Kingdom Hearts?_ Are you _all_ my dorky obsessions come back to haunt me?”

Dean shrugs. “Well, I haven’t seen any blue phone boxes or EVA Units hanging around recently, but the Facility goes deep. And you didn’t exactly throw me a bone, here. I mean, look at me. You’ve reduced me to one those crazy cat hoarders, picking up the scraps and pieces of your brain just to build up my humble abode.”

You ignore his attempt at garnering sympathy.“What do you want with me?” you demand.

The armored splinter steps down the daius and towards you, carrying his tangle of Red Miles with him. You scan the perimeter of your makeshift arena behind your sunglasses, looking for a way out. No dice. No gaps where the Miles can’t spike forward and spear you in an instant. You suppose you could just take your chances and wake up if you get stabbed, but something about this feels like it runs deeper. Somehow, you feel that if you die here, it’s over.

No escape, just him and you. And he’s closing the distance fast. 

“I just want to help you out,” Dean says, genially. He’s even less readable than you are, with the helmet covering up any mode of facial expression whatsoever.

You step back. He steps forward. “No thanks. People have tried to help me, and I just wound up getting stuck in a shitty explosion of candy-coated horseshit.”

“But they promised to make you _happy,_ ” Dean says. He sounds concerned, and compassionate. “And you don’t want happy. You just want rest.”

Your retort dies in your throat, along with the urge to draw your katana and go to town, dance with the devil before he stabs you with his multi-tendrilled 2x3-dent. Well shit, you think, this one gets it.

Dean puts away the Miles-Keyblade, spreading his empty hands out to his sides like he’s about to hug you. “Sorry about that,” he says, “I just had to be sure you wouldn’t run away when I tried to talk to you.”

You stick your hands in your pockets again. “I’d have listened.”

“Would you?” Dean tilts his head. “Look, all you want is nothing. Oblivion. You just want to stop the world so you can get off. I just wanted to tell you that I can give you that.”

Wow. That sounded suspiciously homicidal. “Go on,” you say tersely, reconsidering taking up your fight-or-flight response.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Dean laughs. “If I killed you, all this—“ he spreads his arms out wide to describe the room, the false Aperture, this very strangest of dreambubbles, “—would stop. This place _is_ you. It is your deepest subconscious mind. Your _heart._ It’d be tantamount to suicide to bump you off.”

You open your mouth to say something, and it hangs open until you find something to say.

“My mind is Aperture Science Enrichment Facilities?” Smooth, Strider.

“Neat, clean, organized, and full of science. With some pockets of batshit insanity hiding in the crawl spaces.”

You tilt your head and cross your arms, regarding Dean suspiciously. “Does that make you GLaDOS?”

Dean laughs again. “No, Twilight handles that business quite nicely.”

Your gaze flicks to where the dead-eyed unicorn vanished. Well, that would explain the cattleprod.

“So, do you want to?”

“Want to what?”

Dean extends a hand. “Take my offer. Go to sleep. There’s a place here, all set up, where you can just turn off and become dead to the world.”

You step backwards. Dean steps forwards. “I don’t think so, I have shit to do,” you say, trying to keep panic out of your voice.

“It’d only be for a little while. Just a break. You take a vacation to the tropical island paradise of Total Nothing Isle and relax until you’re ready to come back.”

“I don’t exactly have time for that. We’ve got maybe eight hours until the clockwork miasma of fate throws some other shitty twist our way.”

Dean’s voice falling to a silky, warm tone that feels like lukewarm seaweed slipping down your back. ”Oh, I’ll look after everything.” He steps forward. You step back. “I _promise.”_

“Do you,” you say flatly. You won’t say you’re not tempted, but...

 Dean just seems so genuine, but at the same time _so creepy._ You can’t stop staring at the visor, trying to see what lies beyond it. You can feel him staring at you, and it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Then again, Twilight Spark-HAL was also creepy as fuck and she was perfectly cordial to you.

On the other hand, she’s also apparently your mind-GLaDOS.

Dean sees your hesitation. “Trust me, Dirk. Trust _yourself_. Trust the only part of yourself who understands what you’re feeling right now.” He reaches forward and grabs you by the shoulders, squeezing warmly. Through the thick gloves of his armor, he feels almost clammy, lacking any body heat. “I’m not putting you down, nor am I trying to cheer you up. You want to let it all stop, and I’m willing to help you with that.”

A part of you wants to run screaming, and that part also thinks you’d get killed for trying.

And a part of you wants to give in, is equivocating your common sense reasons for wanting to run, is whispering to you, _it’s just a short break_ and _if you want to escape, you could pull that off easily._

“...Maybe just for a while,” you say. “Eight hours, tops. Then I’m out of here.”

Dean shows no outward response, but you can almost _feel_ him smile and the thought makes you shiver. “Great. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything just the way you would’ve.”

Oh hell no. There’s no way you’d trust him – or anyone you might meet in this crazy place – enough to let him have control over your waking self.

“And don’t go screwing around with my body,” you snap. “Only use it if it’s absolutely necessary. And I’m talking friends-in-danger or Red-Miles-incoming type danger.”

“Fine, fine.” Dean says, “now come on. I’ll take you on a journey to the center of your mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Head meets the desk and I have no clue what I'm doing anymore.


	3. Nightmare Mode

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! I've got a day off of school today on account of an incoming snow-pocalypse. And to celebrate (coding issues aside. I swear I spent most of the day trying to make this shit cooperate with me, to no avail), have the next chapter a little earlier than planned. 
> 
> So! 
> 
> About that Major Character Death...

**> Roxy: Roast marshmallows. **

You _totally_ would roast marshmallows, but you don’t have any on you at the moment. Don’t get you wrong, puffy processed sugar and especially chocolate (God, what you wouldn’t give for some chocolate) on a sweetened cracker all sound awesome right now, but you’re a bit busy. Plus, you don’t want them roast in any alcohol fumes that didn’t get completely burned off.

You toss another bottle of liquor onto the bonfire you’ve got going behind your house. The glass shatters against the burning wood in a very satisfying way, the booze inside igniting with an explosive _fwoom!_  

Shit, you should’ve done this when you first sobered up.

You sit in the firelight, watching the temptations towards your old vice go up in smoke. You’re going to burn them. You’re going to get rid of them all, so you never humiliate yourself like that again. The memories from your Trickster trip-out are pretty hazy, but you _can_ remember confessing to Dirk. And proposing to Dirk. And kissing Dirk.

Heat floods your face, and you sit and hide in your arms even though there’s no one around to see. God, how could you have been so _stupid?_ You were supposed to be the supportive one. You were supposed to not let your own feelings get in the way of Dirk’s happiness. You were supposed to have moved on!

But you can’t. You just can’t.

Your eyes burn when you think of it, and the thought of Dirk’s outburst afterwards makes a few drops of water escape and work their way down your face. Wow, you think, there’s probably a lot of tears going around today.

You still feel for him, even if he can’t love you back the way you want him to.

And that’s the worst part. You know he can’t. He knows he can’t. And he doesn’t want to hurt you with that fact.

That, you supposed, was why he often didn’t text for days after the four of you split up. He was off having fun with his new boyfriend and didn’t want to remind you of that fact; you or Jane. Trying to let you come to terms with that. Trying to spare your feelings.

You think you should apologize to him, for being such a sappy dork who couldn’t control herself. _I’m sorry I can’t move on from loving you even though we both know you don’t love me back._ Maybe you’d invite him to a feelings jam afterwards because damnit, his poor Trickster self looked like he needed it.

Yeah right. You doubt you could even speak to him right now.

God, you’re _pathetic._

“Mew?”

You look up. One of your surviving feline progeny has come to join his mama’s pity-party in the booze-fueled firelight.

“Sup, Mutey Jr.?” You say. Mutey Jr., or more accurately Vodka Mutini Jr. Jr. Jr., is the genetic great-grandchild of Frigglish, and named after your mother’s old cat. You have a tradition, that every direct descendant of good old Frigglish be named after the cat spoken of in her letter to you.

The four-eyed cat rubs against your folded legs, purring like a motor, and curls up in the warmth of the fire. You stroke your absurd little kitten absent-mindedly. Maybe you should go and find another ectobiology lab out in the Furthest Ring and start a meteor-based cat farm. Fuck boys. You’ll just be a crazy cat lady.

Your pocket buzzes and Mutey Jr. swats at the source of the noise. You pull out your pink iPhone to see a Pesterchum window has appeared on the screen.

gutsyGumshoe [GG] began pestering tipsyGnostalgic [TG]

GG: Roxy, I don’t know if you’re in any state to be reading this, but if you do, I want you to know I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking, but with that maddening lollipop I had no idea what I was doing until I woke up with this wicked headache!  
GG: I want you to know that whatever I said, it was the Trickster, not me.  
GG: I’m sorry for forcing you into it to and making you do what you did.  
TG: no no janey!  
TG: im right here gurl and for all intents and purposes a-okay  
TG: howre u? i know i woke up with a rly bad hangover  
GG: Yes, I do believe I experienced that too.  
GG: I know now why you were so cranky for about a day after we entered the game. The morning after is simply awful.  
GG: I deeply apologize again, Roxy. I started this whole mess by acting crazy. :[  
TG: nah  
TG: wasnt u jane  
TG: it was that crazy demon sucker  
GG: Maybe so, but I alchemized it, and then licked it.  
GG: I embarassed myself and all of us, and just dug us deeper into this big ol’ pit of emotional issues we’re all wallowing in.  
TG: meh  
TG: we had to deal with it all at some point  
TG: its kinda like shaking a soda bottle u can keep shaking it and shaking it but its all gotta come out at some point  
GG: Perhaps. :/  
TG: so have you heard from the boys yet  
GG: No, not a peep.  
GG: I messaged Jake, but he says he’s taking care of something at the moment. Isn’t that just like him? >:/  
TG: and dirk?  
GG: There’s even less down the grapevine from him. From what Jake tells me he might as well have dropped off the face of the earth.  
TG: ...  
GG: What?  
TG: its cuz of me and jake isnt it  
GG: No, no.  
GG: Of course not, Roxy. He’s just...  
GG: He’s just dealing with a lot of stuff right now.  
GG: It’s all of us, not just you and him.  
TG: well jeez thats comforting  
GG: Sorry. D:  
TG: well  
TG: i wish id talked to him more but i didnt wanna seem  
TG: jealous?  
TG: i guess is the word  
GG: I suppose I could say the same of myself. I stayed away because I wanted to distance myself from Jake...  
TG: let the lovebirds run off and b happy together amirite?  
GG: Yes...  
GG: ...Do you think we could’ve avoided all this if we had talked more?  
TG: eh who knows  
TG: im just worried about em i guess  
GG: ...we fell in love with a couple of idiots, didn’t we?  
TG: nah i think were all idiots  
TG: in our own different ways i mean  
GG: There’s another word for that.  
TG: wut?  
GG: Teenagers.  
GG: We’re just a bunch of teenagers.  
TG: hehe  
TG: u doin okay? ive learned some hangover tricks over the years thatll help that headache  
GG: You don’t mind it?  
TG: nah  
TG: i think i could use the company  
TG: lets go be crazy cat ladies together jane  
GG: I think I’ll take you up on that offer. Be there in a second.

**> Dirk: Descend.**

With Twilight, you saw the abandoned habitats of Aperture Science’s paper-pushers – or where the paper-pushers would be, if this was a functioning laboratory and not some figment of your twisted imagination.

With Dean, you see Aperture behind the scenes.

The two of you walk along a catwalk hanging precariously over a deep, open chasm. It creaks ominously under your feet, and you can’t help but wince at every _clang_ that rings out under Dean’s heavy boots. The supports are a mess, rusted out, the whole contraption liable to give at any moment. And while you doubt Dean would let you fall to your death if the worst was to happen, but you still walk on your toes around him.

Well, assuming you can even fall and hit the bottom. Assuming there _is_ a bottom in the first place. You can’t even see the apex of the pit below you, but you know from gaming experience that Aperture Science goes down for impossible miles.

That would be a long, terrifying fall.

“So, why a Keyblade Knight?” you ask Dean to distract yourself from looking at your surroundings. “No offense, but I would’ve gone with something more streamlined. And less ridiculous.”

Dean snorts with laughter. “Well, you were, for want of a better word, _obsessed_ with the _Kingdom Hearts_ series when you were... what, ten? Eleven?”

Of course. You remember those halcyon weeaboo days of playing the emulators with Roxy, comparing your gear and abilities and strategies. It was through that that you’d begun to take interest in the concept of self – what constituted _you_ and what was technically you but could also be its own person, like with Sora and Roxas and especially Xion.

You’d grown past the series eventually, when the saccharine Disney-fied speeches about friendship and hope stopped ringing true to you. That, and with the impending apocalypse, the Square Enix of the 21st century had quit producing the games on account of the world ending.

They never even made it up to _Kingdom Hearts III_. Pity.

“I liked the concept of ‘other selves’, same as you did,” Dean goes on. “So I chose one of Sora’s. I think I look like Ven, don’t you? You used to play as him all the time in _Birth by Sleep’s_ PvP mode.”

It’s true, you did. You preferred the younger knight’s speed and agility. Roxy usually went with Aqua, and you’d duke it out for hours in your custom-colored armor. And, now that you think about it, that is where you were getting the niggling sense of familiarity from the knight’s appearance.

“That, and the Keyblade is pretty awesome.” Dean calls up the Miles-blade again. You freeze, falling several steps behind him. “I call it _The Destroyer of Souls._ ” 

He dismisses the weapon and you start following him again as soon as the danger is hidden away. _Destroyer of Souls_. Wow, way to go for the subtle approach.

Then again, nothing about _Kingdom Hearts_ was ever subtle.

You head for the depths of behind-the-scenes Aperture. The fluorescent lights begin to fall away, leaving you in almost-darkness. You keep on hand on the catwalk’s rough, patchy guard rail, catching up to Dean and using his shadow, black on black, and the brush of his cape against your toes to guide you.

You start to see a neon light below you, like the bioluminescence of deep-sea fish. You look down. Streams of color flow below the catwalk, so bright in the darkness it looks like they’re glowing. It runs in streams, rivers and vats, being stirred and mixed and blended into a veritable rainbow of hues. To what end it’s all being used for, though, you can’t tell.

“Like it?” Dean asks. “I mean, it’s functionally useless, but it looks nice. Try taking a dip in the spectra sometime,” he says, pointing at a gigantic, open tub of some of the stuff, colored bright orange. It’s so close you could swan-dive off the catwalk right into it. “It’s like getting a paint-job. I bet the gray batch would be great for cosplayers.”

You realize the unsaid pun when you walk onwards and see the machines on either side of the catwalk, their open tops like gaping maws, full of gnashing teeth, waiting to reduce their unlucky prey to pure color.

“A rainbow factory,” you say flatly, looking at the streams of spectra feeding down from the gigantic meat grinders. “Really, now.”

“Like I said, useless. It’s just an extra layer of skin, like a buffer zone. There are measures in place to ensure intruders wouldn’t get any further than this – even if they survive Twilight Spark-HAL up there.”

You catch sight of something in the spectra pools, a fringe of what looks like feathers cresting the surface. You recognize it as a wing, but the way it sail through the spectra before dipping below and quickly vanishing makes it look remarkably like a shark’s fin.

“What’s that?” you ask Dean, acting mildly interested.

“Ignore her,” Dean says dismissively, not turning around. “She’s just a part of Aperture’s immune system.”

You lag behind Dean, lingering around the guard rail. The creature in the pool surfaces again, revealing pointed ears, a striped mane weighed down by water, and bright, solid, orange eyes, the only part of her unaffected by the spectra pool she swims in.

“She’s the least important part, just a guardian between the upper and lower layers. She won’t do anything to you,” Dean says, rounding back to you and pushing you along in front of him. “Now come _on._ ”

**== >**

The spectra streams follow you and Dean throughout the rainbow factory, which is larger than you’d realized, until they suddenly rear up and begin to twine around the machinery. It takes you a moment to realize that the faintly glowing stripes and curls winding around  you are plants, leeching off the spectra and growing in wild colors. Vines are streaked with neon veins, and leaves are painted with heart-shaped patterns. It all seems to pulse faintly, painting the darkness like colors under black-light. The dark begins to grow brighter again, a wane light shining at the end of the catwalk, silhouetting the splinter in front of you and creating a spectacular cover of luminous foliage.

But as quickly as the forest appears, it withers. The hues grow duller as you head towards the light. The color fades away entirely as the darkness lifts, revealing thin daylight. You stumble out of the rainbow factory, revealing that this deeper layer has somehow gone from what must be miles underground to an overcast wheat field on the surface.

Foliage is still a novelty to you. Pockets of it hide on LOCAH, and LOMAX has a thick, green carpet everywhere you go, but you have not yet adapted to it from your limited world of steel and water. In particular, this limp, colorless grass, brushing up past your knees through your jeans, is a nearly unknown sensation for you.

There’s another tangled, scarlet mess of Miles in the bleak field, all wired to a shifting body in the middle. Not human; still those soft, marshmallow shapes of a cartoon Equestrian. The Miles, making up her mane and her tail, are the only real color on her. Pale, ash gray wings hang open listlessly by her sides. The soft sobs that echo through the air are unmistakably the high and thin voice of another pony.

“Do you recognize her?” Dean asks as he leads you through the field. His voice is soft and delicate, like you’re standing in on a mourning at a funeral parlor. Clearly, this pain is as fresh for him as it is for you.

“I’m going to assume this is some representation of my romantic life.”

“She once chased a bird called hope,” Dean goes on. “You know, ‘that thing with feathers?’ All day, every day, across the meadow. She sang to him all the time. We named her after that song. Flutterwonder.

“In time, the bird became a stallion, whom she loved dearly, and for a time they were happy. But then, he vanished from this place.” You feel Dean’s gaze settle on you, and you look over your shoulder to see him staring at you behind the visor expectantly, like he’s waiting for you to comment on the painfully obvious metaphor.

“Um, hi, lead splinter here. I’d like to cut the fairytales and get to the peaceful oblivion now,” you say.

Dean leads you across the field, picking a path through the Miles to a run-down little shed in the middle of it all, a blot of ink on the gray. You glance at Flutterwonder once more before disappearing into the shed.

She looks up at you, eyes large, watery, and bright orange, the exact same as yours. A feeling like a hot, sharp sword lances your chest when your eyes meet.

“You’re only kidding yourself!” You yell to her.

She doesn’t appear to listen, just hides her head beneath her long and lethal mane again. Dean leads you back into the dark.

“Why the ponies?” you huff. That’s _three_ of the Mane Six now. Are they all down here?

“I dunno, why _Kingdom Hearts?_ Why _Portal?”_ Dean shrugs. “You were the one who identified with them and built all this around yourself, so you should be asking yourself that.”

And it keeps going. Down and down and down. It never stops. You try and remember the figures from the video game. The original Aperture Facility went down, what, 5000 kilometers?

You wonder if your mind goes that deep. You wonder if you’ll find the old, rusted out husks of memories past at the very bottom, or your old demons haunting the pit like the monsters in a child’s closet.

You go through more of a veritable labyrinth of passages ( _god_ , you are so sick of passages), and through a dark workshop where stray robot parts are strung up like carcasses on butcher’s meat hooks. Something like a mechanical spider scuttles off in the distance. “Just ignore it,” Dean says. Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it.

Jesus, you think, if this is your own personal ghost-in-the-machine trip, then something is definitely wrong here. Machinery is rusted, pipes clogged, and many worn out joints of god-knows-what creak like some ominous choral parody around you. Many surfaces are slick with some kind of sticky black gunk that clings to your fingers. Ignore it, Dean tells you.

You’re starting to think this might not be such a good idea after all.

 _Only for a few hours,_ comes the voice of equivocation. _Then you fight your way out._

If you can even remember the way you came in.

“Tell me something,” you say to Dean, catching sight of him over your shoulder. He’s long since fallen behind you to keep you from dawdling. The weird _tmp-tmp-tmp-tmp-tmp_ -ing sound of far too many legs over metal somewhere in the distance made you stop to try and find its source a few too many times for his liking. It’s nothing you have to worry about, he had said, she won’t touch _you._

“Are these weird tableaus of my psyche serving any purpose, or are they just window dressing for my freakshow of a mind-scape?” you eventually ask, when you glance down a dark hallway and find it covered in deranged, Rattman-style scrawlings in what looks suspiciously like blood.

“Bit of both,” Dean says dismissively, pushing you along. “They’re not meant to keep _you_ out, though.”

Maybe it’s the fact that you’re both discussing the same person, but he says “you” with nearly the same contempt you might.

“And who else would they be keeping out?” you ask, catching the other implication of his emphasis.

Dean chuckles, low in his throat, and it was when he does things like that that you regret coming down here.

“People that we don’t want in your mind,” he growls.

Suddenly, he stops in front of Aperture-style airlock door that slowly twists and hisses open.

“Welp, here we are. Welcome to ground zero.”

Beyond the door is black. The room – if it can even be called a room – is entirely bathed in the purest absence of light.

 “Here you are,” says Dean, ushering you into the dark room. You hesitate to go. The void feels suddenly ominous rather than comforting, and you wonder if this is a wise choice, if you can really make it out if you change your mind.

You hear the clink of armor as Dean folds his arms. “Not having second thoughts, are you?” he asks.

You stay silent until you find an excuse that doesn’t sound too cowardly. “What if the guys need me, though?”

Dean lets out an exasperated huff. “I _told_ you, I can handle it. You see, this is your problem. You’re always second guessing yourself, putting yourself down, and refusing to trust your own judgement. Just trust what your gut tells you to do.”

Well, your gut is currently churning with anxiety, and your judgement is screaming at you to run away. You feel the knight’s presence behind you, like a shadow, looming over you and pushing you toward the dark room.

“Think about it. It’s this, or you go back to face your friends.”

Your breath catches, and that’s what snares it for you, because you _can’t_ right now. You don’t want to look at Jane quietly accusing you for her problems with Jake, you don’t want to see Roxy look you longingly out of the corner of her eye and hastily turn away when you turn around, and you really, really, _really_ don’t want to be around Jake right now.

“Fine,” you breathe out, taking a slow step toward the room.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Dean says, sounding pleased with you. He gives you a hard shove, right between the shoulder blades, and you stumble forward into the darkness. The effect is immediate, like anathesia, making you feel numb and fuzzy as soon as you cross the threshold. “In you go!”

The door slams shut behind you, leaving you in total darkness. You panic for just a second, before the complete and absolute _nothing_ chases those thoughts away.

The darkness embraces you like a thick blanket, and you begin to sink into it. It feels like you’re becoming weightless, vanishing, turning into a floating pair of eyes wired up to a three-pound lump of neurons. Well, you think, or maybe say out loud, for sound is nothing here, this isn’t so bad.

You feel yourself close your eyes, though it’s so dark it makes no difference, and slip into nothing.

**> Jake: Find Dirk!**

It took a few hours, but your impeccable instincts have finally led you to where you think Dirk is.

That, and a few friendly carapaces saw him take off in this direction on his rocket board.

You use your own board, given to you on your sixteenth birthday by the man himself, to skate through the interspace to Derse. You hone in on Dirk’s dream-tower. You might as well check there first, you reason.

You glance inside the room, and get lucky. You see Dirk in his bed, passed out on top of his billiard sheets. You think, he looks oddly peaceful.

You land on top of the shining violet dome and recaptchalogue the rocketboard. Wringing your hands, you begin to formulate a plan of action. No need to be nervous, you can’t pussyfoot your way around this anymore.

Best not to startle him. Dirk is a notoriously light sleeper, save for that one time on this very planet when he’d had to kill himself and get a kiss from you, just to wake up his dreamself. You’ll go in, you reason, creep in like a light-footed panther over to his bed, and sit down beside him. It’ll probably wake him up, at which point you’ll begin explaining yourself. That he was being clingy and you had to get away for a while, but you’re very, very sorry for making him worry and for all the troubles you’ve caused him.

There. Simple enough.

 But will he understand, though?

Oh, you hate this. You hate second-guessing yourself and getting lost in yours and other people’s doublespeech. You really, really wish you could ask one of the girls what to do, if this is a good course of action, if you could possibly tell Dirk how you feel without making this whole fuster-clucked, gummed-up mess worse...

But Jane is still angry at you, and Roxy has her own troubles to deal with. You’re alone, and waiting around on top of a tower will accomplish nothing except bury you in your own thrice-blasted doubts again, or possibly distract you long enough for another lollipop-brandishing bolt from the blue to interrupt what simply must be done.

Well... no need to be nervous. You can’t pussyfoot your way around this anymore.

You slide from your perch to the sill of the little window. You look inside, intending to pick out the most fortuous path to Dirk’s bedside, but you find your peepers instead settling on his sleeping form again.

Or rather, where his sleeping form _had_ been. The bed is now empty.

“Dirk?” you call to the room, stepping inside. Blast it all, had he slipped away again while you were soliloquizing your apology? “Dirk, I beg of you, please listen to—“

Suddenly, something grabs you and throws you to the ground – no, not something, _someone._ Dirk Strider has tackled you to the floor of his dream-room, pinning you down. Your head spins, partly from the speed at which it all occurred and partly from the fact that your poor noggin was just smacked against the floor. Okay, so Dirk’s angry at you. It’s no surprise to you, and in fact you even expected it! Well, everyone’s angry at you right now, aren’t they? And for good reason!

But you’ve tussled with him before. You’ve never come out on top, but he’s always held back from harming you too badly. He can’t be angry enough to do you physical harm, can he?

You feel a pair of hands slip around your throat and squeeze. Okay, maybe he _is_ angry enough.

“What the fuck,” Dirk growls out, squeezing your throat tighter, and tighter, until it feels like your head might pop off from the pressure of the air trapped inside you, “did I say, _English?_ ”

You scrabble at his hands desperately, head swimming and all thought cut off except for _can’t breathe can’t breathe what the dickens to do CAN’T BREATHE_. Dirk holds you to the ground, his full weight pressed against your windpipe, his eyes nearly pinpricks, he’s so angry. He’s strangling the life out of you, and somewhere, in the back of your mind, you know that it’s over. He’s not going to let you up no matter what you say, even if you _could_ say it. You can kick and struggle all you like, but you’re effectively dead.

You’re going to die.

And Dirk Strider will be the one to kill you.

 _Well,_ says some soft, defeated voice in the back of your mind, _he certainly hates you enough right now._

Your thrashing begins to peter out as your brain greedily consumes whatever oxygen is left in your body. Black creeps into the edges of your vision. Everything is shutting down. You can’t even feel the burning in your lungs anymore.

But even as your fingers are slipping from Dirk’s hand, you try and tell him. You have to, even if it kills you (which, now that you think about it, it totally did).

“I’m sorry,” you mouth, silently. And keep trying to say it even when your consciousness fades, and you slip into nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> STARE AT WHAT QUALITY IS TO BE GLEANED FROM THIS MEAGER OFFERING, READERS, FOR IT IS ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE.


End file.
